


Reprieve

by flylow



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, F/F, Post-Venice Incident
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-10
Updated: 2018-05-14
Packaged: 2019-05-04 18:31:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 7,332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14599125
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flylow/pseuds/flylow
Summary: Lingering on would-haves solves neither Moira’s problems nor the tension charged between them. She bites her tongue to keep herself from telling Angela how uncharacteristic, how childish, her focus on the irremediable is. A good doctor mends a patient’s wounds, but knows not to waste time lighting a candle death has snuffed out.





	1. Ziegler

**Author's Note:**

> I meant to get this out closer to when Retribution was happening, but I guess it's better late than never. I really hesitated over whether to keep it a one-shot (as was originally intended), or splice it up and publish scenes in increments... Evidently ended up going with the latter, hopefully you guys find the flow/general style works for it. If I end up hating this decision, I might just reformat everything into one chapter once the work's completed. 
> 
> Anyway, the only thing I feel I should disclose in **warning** is a brief use of needles in the first two chapters.  
>  There will be no blood/surgery/invasive procedure (beyond use of needles) of any kind. I didn't want to overburden the tags with a bunch of medical stuff, because even though it all takes place in a medical setting, I don't consider the fic to fall under the medical kink category, and didn't want the tags to suggest as much. I also didn't want to give the impression it's going to be a gorefest, as many fics under those types of tags often are.  
> Also, as a side note, I'm not going to pretend like I think what I've written is necessarily fully medically accurate. The story's more about the emotional undercurrent than what's physically happening. 
> 
> With that out of the way, enjoy!

The backside of the blade that Angela uses to split her undershirt bisects a cold line up her chest. From pelvis to suprasternal notch, it spreads the black spandex free and lets her pale skin fill out the gape. Adrenaline had helped Moira remove most of her own armor before the dropship’s touchdown on headquarters, but without its hand to hold hers now, even the slightest of efforts sends her into a sweat.

A pain simultaneously crushing and piercing presses down onto her torso just as it stabs her from the inside out every time she breathes, sharp and ragged. An attempt to examine the damage herself ends with her head spinning before she has a chance to properly crane her neck. The portable surgical light shining overhead makes her eyes smart.

Angela parts the lacerated edges of her shirt. “Blunt trauma, extensive bruising,” she says, as though speaking to herself, but Moira knows the verbal report is for her benefit, her peace of mind. Angela’s expression is distant. The lines creasing between her brows betray little. “What happened?”

Pain locks her jaw and a gag order rusts its hinges, but Angela’s eyes bore into her with a force that tears her hesitancy asunder and leaves her mouth dry as sandpaper. “I was hit.”

A passing sweep of a Heavy Assault’s arm had strength enough to knock her several feet airborne. Only instinct to take to the shadows had spared her the hurt of a second impact, of ping ponging limp-limbed off a brick wall.

Moira braces herself for the heat of Angela’s frustration to cow her into a corner, but it’s her frigidity that castigates her instead. The pain contorting her features doubles the challenge of communicating apology, but Moira tries. Whether the effort appeases Angela or not, she presses no further.

“Difficulty breathing?” she asks after the slightest of sighs. Moira fails to tell whether she’s exhausted or disappointed.  

“A bit.”

Angela’s touch at either side of her waist shocks her into tension. She crawls toward her navel and palpates to the rhythm of Moira’s aortic pulse, which throbs discomfort into the affected flesh surrounding. It’s all so raw beneath her skin, she’s certain that Angela’s hands rooting around inside of her would feel no different than the deep presses of her fingers.

“It was supposed to be an infiltration mission. Noncombat.”

At the bite in her voice, Moira aches to offer Angela a proper explanation. She wants to quip something about Murphy’s Law, too, but Angela grants her no time for either.

Her fingers have climbed to her ribs, where she holds her between her hands and bears down rather too hard, precisely at the wrong place. Moira’s vision clouds to white as pain ripples across her chest and seizes the length of her spine.

“Angela,” she yelps, a warning and a plea. Her whole body presses back into the examination table, her nails gouge slits into its cushioning, and she fights the instinct to fade to smoke to escape further harm.

“Sorry,” Angela whispers. The spots in Moira’s vision blot away most of Angela’s face, but she recognizes apology and guilt when she hears it. “I’m sorry.”

Her hand rests against her breastbone, a gentle weight for Moira to level her breathing against. If she blinks, the tears will brim over and spill to her ears, so she rolls her eyes up to corral them instead. Finally, her focus coalesces onto Angela, who stares past her rather than at her, whose guard drops just enough to unclothe a sliver of her upset.

Slowly, she resumes palpating down the ladder of her ribs.

“There,” Moira hisses. “That really hurts.” Drunkenness, fatigue, and emotion, if strong enough, coax unfiltered Irish prosody to the blade of her tongue. Pain affects her no differently. She sounds suddenly much less from Dublin than from a small seaside Gaeltacht when Angela probes several intercostal spaces.

“I’ll give you something for the pain once I’m done.”

The stethoscope Angela’s stored in her coat pocket uncoils between her fingers and bites her head between its eartips. Because the chestpiece is cold, the smooth metal almost feels wet when Angela glides it over her skin.

“Breathe,” she instructs. “As deeply as you can.”

Moira obeys and inflates her lungs carefully, as though they’ll pop against her needle-sharp pain if they expand too much or too quickly. The attempt is repeated when it satisfies Angela, whose head tilts off to the side as she auscultates. Her eyes follow the shaky rise and fall of Moira’s chest and her hand dots with the stethoscope’s diaphragm patterns she’s long learned by heart. One path snakes from trachea to lower lung, another hugs the underside of her breast, and the last neatly boxes her umbilicus.

The way the instrument kisses her skin is so clinical that Moira wishes for Angela’s touch again, for something warm, a reassuring hand against her arm, at least. But when the examination comes to a close, she withdraws completely to slip the stethoscope back into her coat.

“You’re lucky your lungs didn’t collapse.”

“How quickly can you mend the ribs?”

“You know how the nanobots work on bone at the moment,” she explains, “We’ll have a better idea in a minute.”

Moira imagines a string mooring her to Angela. It stretches as the space between them increases with every one of Angela’s steps away from the examination table. By the time she’s reached the ultrasound machine, which isn’t far off at all, the cord’s already been tugged taut. So when she travels past the drawn curtain to the other end of the room, it twinges and threatens to snap.

The pair of pills nested at the center of Angela’s palm upon her return makes the separation worthwhile. She pinches them carefully off her hand and offers them to Moira, who parts her lips to take the painkiller from her fingertips. A hand at the back of her head props her up just enough so she can drink from a cloudy plastic cup. The water helps flush the pills down her throat.

The snap of a bottle’s cap heralds the freezing touch of gel that Angela slathers liberally, and deliberately without forewarning, across a section of her ribs. Moira gasps at the cold, but has restraint enough not to flinch away for fear of exacerbating her pain.

Angela’s eyes avoid Moira’s as she walks the transducer up and down the tenderest of places. The ultrasound imaging wholly captures her attention and Moira ignores the pressure the process necessitates, uncomfortable, but not painful.

Eventually, Angela’s voice splits their silence without her looking from the monitor. “Were you seen?” she asks.

“What?”

“In Venice. Did anyone see you?”

Moira’s throat tightens, and it’s worse than dry-swallowing pills. “It isn’t unlikely.” It is, in fact, more than probable, considering the havoc they strung behind them through the city, a ball and chain cuffed to their ankles. It would surprise her to learn even a single soul had slept through their escape.

A twitch at the corner of Angela’s lips draws her expression into a frown for a moment before snapping back like a bow, her mouth a tight, straight line. She clicks the machine off and the grey blur of Moira’s insides disappears. She turns without sparing her a glance and mumbles words mostly lost as she makes to leave the room. Something about the nanobots required for treatment.

Alone, Moira closes her eyes and sees suns webbing across the backs of her eyelids where the light shines above her. Her jaw clamps and her teeth grit together hard enough her temples ache, but it isn’t the pain that tightens her like a vice. Self-directed frustration rises like bile up her throat and the taste lingers in her mouth the longer she thinks on Angela’s disappointment in her.

When Angela returns, she wipes clean with a cloth the streaks of gel she’s left on Moira’s skin that haven’t dried yet. The warmth of her touch isn’t laced with discomfort now that the painkillers have started to take effect, and makes Moira realize how cold the air in the room is in comparison.

Angela snaps on a pair of gloves and wheels a stainless steel tray laden with a set of prepped syringes to Moira’s bedside. She picks one of them up after swabbing a circle against her skin with a wad of cotton dipped in antiseptic. The prick of a needle pinches into her, but the injection otherwise leaves nothing but a phantom pressure in its wake. Moira turns her head against her shoulder to watch Angela sink the plunger slowly into the barrel as she draws the syringe away. Monitoring the procedure calms her nerves somewhat. Angela’s hard expression does not.

It dawns on Moira then that Angela hasn’t truly _looked_ at her, hasn’t locked their eyes together, since she’s laid her on the examination table.

“Stop staring at me like that,” Angela tells her midway through her third injection, attention devoted to her own hands.  

“Like what?”

“Like you can’t stand my being angry with you.”

The needle leaves a pinprick hole against her skin and Angela dabs at it before moving on.

“That’s all it is? Anger?”

Something else lives behind her eyes. It swims beneath glossy blue, cautious never to stir so much as a ripple against the surface, but Moira catches its silhouette under the right light. It flicks its tail like a flail, restless, and once it tires, sinks slowly away in aimless circles.

“You’re right,” Angela says, “I’m disappointed, too.”

Moira frowns. The skin over her ribs gives one last time under the tip of the needle, and then the empty syringe joins its sisters with a clatter into the sharps container. Angela’s used gloves fall to the trash after she peels them off, from wrist to fingertips.  

“They’ll be mostly mended in a few hours. You’re not allowed to leave here until Jack calls you in for debriefing, but we can move you to one of the beds.”

The meds have tamed her pain enough to keep her stomach from seizing at the thought of standing up, and her eyelids grow heavy at the suggestion alone of sleep. Angela guides her upright. Swinging her legs off the side of the examination table and finding the floor with her feet proves easy enough, but even with Angela’s arms to steady her, a new sheen of sweat dews over her brow once their walk to the nearest bed is over.

With the fresh shirt Angela helps her into and the blanket she pulls up to her chest, warmth and comfort swaddle Moira for the first time since her return to base. Out of care, pity, or good bedside manner, Angela runs a cloth over her forehead to keep the sweat from cooling and drying there.

“Get some sleep.”


	2. Angel

In Moira’s dream, Angela spends a moment holding her face between her hands before her fingers hook into the collar of her undershirt, the one that sheathes her neck and cradles her jaw where it normally peeks past her armor. The tough fabric shreds to wisps with no resistance when Angela tugs down against it. Moira’s bare skin pebbles and her nipples harden as they meet the air. This time, the room is warm, and the stabbing in her chest, dulled to a throb. 

“The boys aren’t used to fighting alongside a medic,” Angela reasons, “If Gabriel had given them some pointers, this might have been avoided.”

“They aren’t to blame. I could have seen it coming.”

“You did just fine.”

She shines her a smile that Moira feels too tired to properly return, but it soothes some of the discomfort born of her hands pressing into her discolored abdomen. Angela murmurs apologies every time Moira winces and instantly they numb the pain away. She sings her soft praises for a job well done as she rolls Moira gently over by the hips, so she can palpate at her back, too.

“Keeping calm enough to bring the team back in one piece, even when things go wrong… it’s more easily said than done. I’m impressed, honestly. You should be proud.”

Moira’s chest rises and falls quickly under Angela’s wandering hands.

“Breathe nice and slow for me,” she instructs. Her hands fan out like a butterfly’s wings over her ribs, thumbs positioned close to the base of her sternum. A pressure that should suffocate grounds her instead.

Moira tries.

“Good,” Angela says, and even when Moira’s breath shakes on her second attempt, continues, “That’s good. Just like that.”

The encouragement makes something in Moira beam, climbing hot over her chest from the point between Angela’s thumbs. It creeps up her neck and she wonders how long before Angela might notice her breathing start to shallow, or her heart start to knock against her ribs.

“I knew you’d get back alright, you know. Ana had her doubts, but I knew. The quick-witted get themselves out of most anything.”

Somehow a syringe wedges itself between Angela’s fingers without her having reached for it, as though someone’s snipped away at time’s reel to put it there. The cotton swab that passes over her ribs promises a sting in its wake, and Angela holds the needle closer. Her free hand rests against Moira where she’s left it.

“Just relax.”

Angela’s voice falls to a murmur. Moira strains to catch every warm word she imparts upon her, but there’s cotton in her ears, too. Her eyes track the parting and closing of Angela’s lips, read their shape to fill the gaps where her hearing fails her.

Distracted by the needle, captured by Angela’s gaze pinning her own, and enraptured by her musings, Moira doesn’t register the hand that skims the space below her navel until it slips past the waistband of her underwear. Angela’s fingers play through her curls even as she goes on treating Moira’s injured side with the hand that holds the syringe.

“Relax,” she repeats, and leans closer so that her breath just flirts against Moira’s lips. Moira wants to lift her head off the table, to invite Angela into her mouth, and the distraction eases her off the shock of the hand wandering between her legs. “Let me make it better.”

She gasps, and in her dream, her breathing grows labored for reasons other than pain. Her thighs squeeze against Angela’s fingers for a heartbeat before she relaxes, and lets them taste between her lips.

“That’s it,” comes Angela’s encouragement as she collects all that Moira drips for her. The needle somehow disappears, though its sting doesn’t, and with her hand freed, she brushes back Moira’s fringe. With the other, she traces up her petals and coats her clit with wetness clear and slick as honey. “You’re doing so good. You have been all night.”

Moira groans. Angela’s voice mixes with the painkillers in her system until Moira grows heady for it. Exalted to the point of intoxication, she drinks in every word that pours off Angela’s lips until she’s flushed to the tips of her ears.

“There,” Angela croons, hovering close. Her fingers dip easily into Moira, shallow for the restriction of her underwear, but more than enough. “You’re beautiful like this.”

Moira lets herself whimper when Angela finally kisses her. She captures her lips and coaxes them apart quickly, in control with her mouth as she is with her fingers below Moira’s waistband. Their tongues slip together and when Angela moans, Moira moans, too. Angela, pleased, pulls away with glistening lips and the pace of her fluttering fingertips, coiling Moira tight, increases almost imperceptibly. Moira’s hips stutter.

“Perfect.” Angela breathes the word and it curls like smoke into Moira’s ear. Her eyes and fingers probe, and Moira readily lays all of herself bare for her. All her cards shake and fall and her eyes shut tight as she comes.

Once finished, Angela extracts her fingers from between the blooming corolla of her sex to trace a path up to her navel. There’s gel for the ultrasound spread over Moira’s belly that she doesn’t remember getting there, and the heat coating Angela’s fingers cools where one wetness mixes with the other over her skin.

“Sleep,” Angela says, “You’ve earned it.” Her hand sweeps over her cheek so that she can cradle Moira’s jaw with her palm.

Moira listens and closes her eyes, because a whisper of consciousness threatens to pull her awake, and she doesn’t want to watch this dream fade to half-remembered wisps just yet.


	3. Mercy

Angela stirs after three hollow knocks sound at the door. Moira keeps her eyes shut even though she’s woken, and lets her hearing paint the scene where her vision doesn’t. The click of Angela’s heels maps her path across the room: from the corner occupied by the desk that stands flush with the wall, past the bed Moira feigns sleep in, to the door awaiting answer. It slides open with a whoosh at a press of Angela’s finger. The dryness in Moira’s throat makes it hard to swallow down her nerves. Only a flimsy wall of fabric stands between her and a conversation she suspects will end in her probation in the very best of cases. She strains to hear the whispers. 

“—O’Deorain to debriefing,” she catches the tail end of a sentence, carried on a voice she doesn’t recognize.

When Angela replies, her words are much quieter in comparison, but Moira, familiar with the edges of her accent, has no trouble picking them out. “She’s still recovering. Tell Commander Morrison I’ll have her discharged this afternoon.” Her manner has the particular grace of communicating authority without sounding patronizing or unkind. 

Moira’s held breath leaves her and relief fills its place at the promise of a few hours more spent in peace. The absence of pain as her lungs expand tells her Angela’s nanobots have had ample time to work already. She opens her eyes to seek out the clock hung up on the wall opposite the one her bed is pressed against. Her contact lenses, out of mind last night, have dried out enough to cause discomfort.

The second hand ticks to twelve precisely as Angela clicks the door shut again, after her hushed dismissal of a Moira’s reaper. When she approaches from behind the drawn curtain, Moira makes an effort to look too groggy to have been properly eavesdropping.

“Was that for me?”

“Mm,” Angela affirms with her lips drawn tight. She stares at Moira a moment from where she stands sentry at the foot of the bed. “Jack sent someone up. They want you in for debrief later today. You can rest here until then.”

Moira finds no motive to ascribe to Angela’s lie that doesn’t make her overthink, overhope, in a million ways. She licks her chapped lips to color them soft and pink again.

“Could I ask a favor?” Moira dares. She takes Angela’s muteness as invitation to continue. “I have a spare pair of glasses in my locker. And a change of clothes, too.”

“You’re going in for a debrief, not a job interview.”

“It’s mostly for the glasses,” she explains, cautious to keep any bite from her tone. “I’ve had my contacts in since yesterday.”

Angela sighs, but listens as Moira gives her the combination to her locker. 9653, unchanged from when they’d first given her the reprogrammable access code.

Moira lies staring at the ceiling alone a long while after Angela leaves the room. She sees most the world in blurs after removing her contacts, which she sets against the stand by her bed without much care over whether they end up trashed or not. Sleep tugs harder against her hand the more time Angela is gone for, but she forces herself not to follow the urge before her return.

The door finally clicks open, and Moira wonders what the clock would tell her if she could see its face. Soft blues of early morning light the half of the room closest to the windows, and just hit Angela’s face when she makes it to her bedside again. Moira’s glasses sit atop a stack of folded clothes she balances flat over her right hand. Moira unladens them from her, unfolds simple black frames, and pushes them up to the bridge of her nose. With the lenses’ help, she’s able to focus on the words running across the holopad Angela holds in her other hand. She reads their mirror image until the device is turned to face her.

“Not unlikely, indeed,” Angela echoes Moira’s statement from several hours before. Below the bold black lettering of the article heading, Moira recognizes in the accompanying photograph her own silhouette, the neat lines of her profile, the unmistakable red of her hair peaking out from under a hat, and the clunky tank strapped at her back. Gabriel stands centered on the image of a wrecked Venetian street, but Moira and the rest of the team don’t attract any less attention for being in the background.    

She waits in silence, staring blankly through the spaces between the holopad’s projection, because she doesn’t know what to tell Angela.

“You really fucked up.”

She barbs her words with frustration unrestrained for the first time since Moira’s returned from the mission, and Moira looks up to Angela reflexively at the shock of them digging into her. When she had her laid across the examination table, her anger had been raw and steeled, but Moira hears in her tired voice the way the hours since have churned the emotion and stained it blue.

“I stood by Gabriel’s decision.” She still does, but feels like a coward for offering Gabriel as a target for Angela’s blame.

“That’s it then—no regrets? You aren’t upset?”

Moira grits her teeth, annoyed that Angela would ask a question so stupid. “Of course I’m upset.” The strength to keep their eyes locked fails her, so Moira turns to look out the window. “I don’t dislike it here, as scarcely as it shows.”

The array of resources at her disposal makes the stay more than worth her while, but it’d be disingenuous not to acknowledge that the few friends—if she could call them as much—she’s found at Overwatch sometimes made a good thing better. She isn’t one to plant her roots, but the soil here might have coaxed her into growing them out a while.

“Would you have betrayed a friend, Angela? To save yourself?”

“Of course not,” she says, as though Moira’s missed the point by a mile. “I would have stopped him before it came to that.”

Lingering on would-haves solves neither Moira’s problems nor the tension charged between them. She bites her tongue to keep herself from telling Angela how uncharacteristic, how childish, her focus on the irremediable is. A good doctor mends a patient’s wounds, but knows not to waste time lighting a candle death has snuffed out.

“The damage is done—”

“Speaking of damage,” Angela interrupts, remembering her practice. The deliberate, jarring shift in topic helps her harden her expression. Moira bites her tongue.

She folds the blanket back over her lap to grant Angela’s hands room enough to lift the hem of her shirt to the underside of her breasts. Bruises across her abdomen green already at the edges thanks to the nanobots accelerating her recovery. The attention Angela pays her body summons a specter of Moira’s dream to memory that makes heat rise to her cheeks. When Angela drops her shirt back without so much as grazing her with her fingertips, warring relief and disappointment wash Moira’s imagination dry.

“Why are you so angry over this?” Quid pro quo, Moira swallows the lump in her throat and asks a stupid question for an equally stupid question.

Angela casts her gaze aside, frowns, and shakes her head. Her mask slips and Moira recognizes a sadness there she’s only caught glimpses of until now.

“Where will you go?”

To Angela’s credit, the question, quiet as it comes, sounds as impartial a wondering as it can.

Moira waits until Angela finds her eyes before offering a smile, and what’s meant to be a shrug, though the dull ache that stretches stubbornly at her side likely makes it look a twitch more than anything. “Trouble has historically had its compass set on me. I’ll find something before long.”

Angela, impassive, thinks through a silence Moira prefers not to stew in.

“Worried for me, Doctor Ziegler?” She plays with the melody hugging the corners of her words and pitches into something close to their familiar brand of teasing. It half succeeds because Angela tries a laugh, a hollow stuttered echo so exhausted it loses itself down her throat. It doesn’t crinkle the corners of her eyes or draw lines around her mouth.

“If I let myself worry over you, it’d drive me to an early grave.”

Whether Moira’s hand finds Angela’s or Angela’s finds Moira’s first is impossible to tell once they’ve met in the middle, by Moira’s thigh, against clean white hospitals sheets checkered with creases. Even with Angela’s head bowed towards the floor, Moira sees her struggling not to choke on something the more effort she pours into betraying no emotion whatsoever.  

They stand still as stone, with Moira’s fingers wrapped tightly about Angela’s, for a long while, until Angela severs the touch. The crescent shadows that darken the tender skin below her eyes drag her face down with a weight like the sun’s when the earth pulls it to its horizon.

“Sleep, won’t you?” Moira bids her as she senses them drift apart. “I can tell you’ve been up all night.”

“I might not have been, if the mission had gone right.”

Angela’s anger tides over Moira with all the strength it can gather, but Moira plants her feet firmly in the sand so as not to let it wash her offshore. The water laps cold at her ankles once she gives the wave time enough to calm. Its surface clears and she sees fish no longer than the phalanges of her fingers swim up to kiss her toes.

She slides one body width away from Angela across the bed. Her movements carry with them the slow deliberation of someone trying either not to scare a skittish animal away, or not to provoke a predator lying in wait. She finds her voice after stilling.

“You’ve locked the door, haven’t you?”

Angela glares holes into her that rip her apart, but before she has the chance to open her mouth, Moira forces herself to continue, “If you won’t sleep, just rest for a bit. Please.”

It takes full minutes, but eventually, Angela lowers herself to sit on the bed in the space Moira creates for her. Stress braided around the length of her spine unweaves from the base of her neck to the small of her back, and her weight falls readily into the mattress without anything to shackle her upright. The size of the bed necessitates they lie with their arms flush together, but Moira otherwise takes care to keep to herself. That Angela took her invitation at all is a step enough in the right direction.

She watches in her peripheral vision as Angela pulls out her phone and sets an alarm for herself. “Just in case,” she explains.

Relieved at the proximity, but unnerved at the tension that keeps them cordoned off, Moira struggles to relax even as Angela unwinds beside her. She stiffens like a corpse, and for a while thinks this, too, might all be a dream, but the specific fresh fragrance of Angela’s perfume, a splash of color in a sterile room, is too accurate not to be real. Angela falls asleep and Moira lies awake, listening to the even ebb of her breathing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wanna try to put the last chapter out tomorrow if I can swing it!  
> Feel free to drop kudos/comments in the meantime if you're likin the story :) It's super motivating.


	4. Angela

The chirping of Angela’s alarm wakes Moira less rudely than the officer’s earlier knocking at the door, perhaps because it sounds before deep sleep has the chance to take her. One of the hospital bed’s side rails, which raise up like wings to cage her and Angela together, presses to her back, and the corner of their shared pillow leaves lines against her cheek. Though they’ve turned to face each other at some point over the past couple of hours, a space large enough to accommodate another person wedges them apart. Moira places her hand there, against the mattress, and watches Angela mirror her tired blinking as they wake together. The frames of her glasses dig against the side of her face, so she lifts her head to pull them off and set them aside. Angela lies close enough that they aren’t needed to pull her into focus, anyway.

A press of her finger shushes the alarm away, and then Moira sees in the way Angela looks at her that she’s remembering the night that passed, along with what it spells for the day ahead. Inhibited by sleep, her guard stands paper-thin between them. The patterns painted onto its face zigzag in sharp, angry lines, but the sadness that bleeds from beneath stains soft colors into its fabric. Moira feels her own expression shake as she reads the hurt in Angela’s.

“I’m sorry,” she breaks the silence to whisper. Remnants of sleep warp her voice, so she clears her throat and repeats herself, crystal clear, “I’m sorry, Angela.” Even though what happened in Venice exceeded the bounds of her control, even though Antonio’s murder doesn’t bother her in the least, genuine remorse at affecting Angela so, at killing a future she had never let herself fantasize over, weighs at her very core.

“At least you didn’t die,” Angela says. It’s biting, but perhaps the closest thing to a  _“good job”_  that Moira could ever hope for.

“I do try not to.”

Angela studies her, looking no less tired for the little sleep she’s stolen, and the space between her brows furrows the longer she thinks.

“Thank you for taking care of me,” Moira tells her, trying a different angle.

“It’s my job.”

Her tone feigns apathy, but her eyes can’t stand to back the sentiment, so they dart away to find Moira’s hand resting against the bed. Angela raises her own, pushes Moira’s aside, and breaches the distance to press her palm flat against her stomach. Slipped beneath the fabric of her shirt, her fingers splay to cover as much of the nebula of Moira’s fading bruises as they can. The touch is impossibly warm, and the pain in her ribs from last night, nonexistent. They haven’t been a bother, even without a new dose of painkillers, for several hours now.

“And for letting me stay,” Moira ventures, knowing Angela chose to delay the inevitable when she could have thrown her to the dogs the second they’d tracked her scent.

A short nod pulls her head to her chest, her mouth thins to a frown, and her eyes remain downcast as she sinks back into hiding. But Moira fishes her out before she disappears, with a single finger tilting up her chin and a look that pleads she stay.

Angela’s resignation comes clumsily.

Once whatever wars inside of her has settled, she batters down her barricades and lets her upset run free. Unburdened by its keeping, all the muscles in her face relax, and with her hand still on Angela’s chin, Moira watches the gradual softening of her brow, her eyes, her mouth. She tries not to think that, for a passing moment, something in Angela looks on the verge of bursting, the way a wave crests before it breaks to salt over wet sand.

The time it takes Angela to marry her gaze to Moira’s lets her deliberate the space between them before she takes it over. She cranes her neck, brushes their noses together, and Moira feels her breath tickling her skin even as she holds her own tight in her lungs. Angela freezes the instant her lips touch down in offering, feather-light, onto Moira’s.

Moira starves too much to bother with restraint. Kissing Angela offers an inkling of control that she hasn’t tasted since her fate was sealed in Venice, that she knows she won’t taste again until well after the brass wipes her from Overwatch’s history. She places her hand against the dip of Angela’s waist and holds her firmly there, around her ribs, as she plays their lips together.

Angela’s anger resurfaces, and it nips hard enough to make Moira hiss and grip her tighter, but tires in time. When Moira soothes the hurt by sucking at her lips, and then at her tongue once her mouth parts, Angela whines. Moira takes Angela hooking her heel at the crook of her knee as invitation to press her thigh between her legs. The waistline of her skirt rides up as the fabric bunches up over her hips. She lets loose little moans, almost plaintive, with every slow rock of her hips over Moira’s thigh. She braces herself against her chest and Moira rolls her back against the mattress.

“I’m still mad at you,” Angela whispers, even though her hands are soft in her hair.

“But you miss me, too.” Past, present, and future: Angela missed her when she ran the streets of Venice, she misses all the moments they’ve lost, just as she’ll miss her once she’s banished. That Angela’s reaction at her leaving points to a feeling bigger than fondness is a thought born warm in Moira’s chest. She tries to smother it before it grows, because it’s come far too late.

She bears her weight against Angela precisely where pressure will make her gasp, and catches the sound on a kiss. Their lips come apart with a wet sound and Moira feels warmth spread from her collar to the tips of her ears at having Angela pinned beneath her. A healthy pink spreads over her cheeks, the same muted color the sky flushes at sunset, as her hands crawl up beneath Moira’s shirt to play with her breasts. A pinch of her fingers makes Moira inhale sharply through her nose. She steels herself so as not to tremble under the touch, a far cry from the clinical attention received earlier, and licks her lips before speaking.

“I never meant for—”

Her apology hangs forever unsung as Angela pinches harder, sharp as a sting. She runs her nails, however short, down Moira’s back to make her groan.

“Please, don’t talk,” she says, as though pained at the thought of Moira going on. Moira thinks she sees her eyes flit to the clock on the wall for no more than a second. “Just stay like this with me.”

Moira frowns but answers Angela’s request by bringing their lips together again. Kisses are shared with less hurt than words, and Moira wants to lick whatever wounds she can before Angela releases her.

What starts off shy of chaste unravels Angela quickly, because Moira knows too well the paths to trace with her tongue that wind her tight. She mouths hungrily at her neck, sucks at the delicate spot just below her ear, and caresses the shells of her hips. She grabs her backside and massages gently at the sensitive skin between where her cheeks end and her thighs begin, teasing up beneath the edges of her panties.

In no time at all, the thin fabric soaks clear against the insistent press of Moira’s thigh. Angela writhes for more friction, desperate to molt the arousal trapped in the billions of nerves across her skin. She spreads her legs wider in invitation and Moira skips teasing, skips driving her to the edge of frustration, because doing so would violate the sincerity of her apology.

She circles her clit and runs over her folds to help the mess along. Once Angela’s wetness coats her fingers liberally, she sinks two of them roughly inside her and stills at her gasp. Moira waits, with slick softness hugging her tight, for Angela to set their rhythm before pumping in time with her hips. She dots kisses across Angela’s jaw as she grinds down into her palm, and then catches her lips as her thumb brushes clumsily across her swollen clit, to coax out pretty noises.

Angela’s whimper breaks in her throat when Moira pushes a third finger inside her. She loves the feeling of Angela stretching around her, the way she throbs when she fucks her harder, and the way she drips more onto every deep stroke.

She wants more than she can offer. She wants to drink from between the banks of her thighs until the sorrow passes downstream. She wants a toy to help, so that she can knock their hips roughly together and hold Angela still in her arms all the while, until the anger coiled at her core comes loose in a million pieces.

The way Angela swallows her fingers, though, and the way her hands clutch their bodies close, tells Moira this is precisely what she needs. She hastens her pace and curls her fingers and Angela cries into her neck when she takes her to her knuckles. As poor of a muffler as she makes, Moira is certain anyone whose orbit clips too close to the door might hear her sounds.

“Moira.”

She moans unabashedly, swears and gasps on every thrust at the momentary relief simple pleasure provides. Something shatters over the tip of her tongue, a sentence half strung together, and loud as it is, it’s impossible to make out for how disjointed her thoughts are, buried into Moira’s skin.

Moira wraps her free arm around Angela and holds their bodies tightly together, as though the press of their chests might glue back all their drifting-apart pieces. Angela tenses quickly, shakes in her arms, and Moira sees her the rest of the way to release.

Once spent, she falls down slowly. Her breath puffs against Moira’s ear, her hands grip at the back of her shirt, and she clenches onto her fingers until her wildly beating heart quiets to a steady knock between their chests. Moira extricates herself gently, but Angela still makes a small sound like discomfort at the withdrawal. She invites Moira to rest the full of her weight against her and runs one hand through her sweaty, disheveled hair.

“I’m a horrible doctor,” she says. Moira shift so as only to half-cover Angela’s body with her own, so that she can speak away from where her face is buried against her neck. “Your ribs aren’t fully healed yet.”

“They’ll be alright.”

Angela readjusts her ruined panties and tugs her skirt back down to cover her thighs, and Moira thinks it looks like she’s trying to tie up all the loose ends she managed to unravel. But even with her efforts to tidy up, Angela still smells like sleep and sex. What’s left of her on Moira’s fingers dries sticky there. She sits up on the bed built for one and stills that way, the long quiet after a storm.

Moira stands to wash her hands at the small sink across the room, with Angela at her back and the wall clock that hangs before her presiding over them both. She wipes them against her shirt, because there’s nothing else within reach that will do, and hesitates to turn again. To see Angela’s disappointment had cut something tender in her, and to see her hurt had ripped it apart. To hear the sadness in her voice now blackens her bruises all over again.

“We probably won’t see each other again.” It sounds between a statement and a realization.

Moira owes it to Angela to turn around. It’s only right to share the burden of burying what they’ve lost, considering Moira’s hand dealt its death onto the table. The freedom to stretch her legs after so many hours bedridden should be a blessing, but her feet grow heavier with every step she takes back towards the bed, as though their weight might stick them to the vinyl flooring and rip her at the ankles when she tries to lift them. Holding Angela’s gaze helps more than it hurts, though, and Moira tries for a smile.

The mattress dips where she sits beside Angela. She wants to kiss her, but settles for joining their hands. Her thumb rubs over Angela’s skin until she opens for her and links their fingers together.

“I’m sure that we will,” she tells her. “Eventually.”

“Eventually,” she agrees, though they both know things will never be what they could have been.

Their window of time together shrinks impossibly fast the more Moira worries over making the most of it. The feeling of being swept by a current to the height of a fall freezes her in an endless loop where she can do nothing but focus on catching breath. Angela’s outwardly nervous energy, so different from her own, betrays that her thoughts whirlpool just the same. They fret at her edges and translate to mindless fussing without words to cling to. When she needs something to sate her urge to fidget, she drops Moira’s hand and finds the pile of folded clothes forlorn by the side of the bed.  

She starts with the shirt and Moira helps when she tries to settle it over her shoulders. Dressing her serves as distraction to them both, so she quickly peels off the bottom half of her suit to then take the fresh pair of pants from Angela’s hands. Their weight constricts stiffly about her legs after she slips into them. She rag dolls back onto the bed, sitting with her shoulders curled in towards her chest and her head bowed to the earth. Her gaze levels with the tips of Angela’s shoes, which stand squared between her feet.

Between losing her job and ushering the public’s attention towards ties preferably kept secret, Angela should be low on her list of concerns. But the way her heart flutters as Angela takes her face between her hands, to lift her head up for her, tells her she shouldn’t be surprised the opposite is true. Angela kisses her softly and she closes her eyes.

Moira loops her arms around her waist, and when Angela lets her go, tightens the circle to bring her between her legs. She hides her face against her bosom. Angela fixes her hair more than she plays with it for how her fingers comb loose strands back in place.

“I won’t call someone for you,” she says. “But it’s about time.” Moira will collect, thanks to Angela, another morsel of control at walking to debriefing on her own, rather than leashed to an officer.

It hurts to peel herself from Angela. Abrasions she knows will mend far less quickly than bruises stick to her skin everywhere they’ve touched. Angela has stretched thin all their time that she can, but the truth is that no wealth of it would have readied Moira for this moment. She kills her wish for Angela’s embrace again before her mind shapes a request of it.

Angela stays rooted by the foot of the bed after she steps aside to let her stand. Moira finds her glasses and slips them on with the disembodied slowness of swimming through something much thicker than water. She struggles to find breath once she’s waded to the door without a single interruption. Sighting the cord between them severed might end in tears for either of them, so she saves herself the risk of turning around. She bites her lip and angles her head just enough to let Angela’s figure live at the border of her vision.

“Until…  _eventually_ ,” she manages, “whenever that may be.”

It’s all Moira can do not to drown in the silence that follows, but it dawns on her, once Angela finally clears her throat, that she must have been nodding, taking every measure to stay afloat, too.

“Farewell, Moira,” she says, and on those two choked words, casts her off.


End file.
